We are a decade in to the “player empowerment era” of the NBA, which started with the Miami Heat when Dwyane Wade got LeBron James and Chris Bosh to join him in Miami to form a Big 3 and has continued through various iterations of that same manner of team-building by getting stars to combine forces in Cleveland, Golden State, Los Angeles, and most recently Brooklyn.
The volatility of this era has been fascinating, as stars are more capable of dictating their future, seeking out new situations when they feel it is advantageous to them — a stark change from when the power to make changes at a whim lay almost solely with front offices. The Nets with Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, and James Harden are the current title favorites in the NBA and have laid waste to the Milwaukee Bucks through two games of their second round series even with Harden on the bench with a hamstring injury.
Naturally, comparisons are drawn between Brooklyn and that Miami squad of James, Wade, and Bosh, and the latter of those was asked about that by Trevor Noah during a recent appearance on The Daily Show. Noah initially asked who would win, and Bosh explained that as a competitor he’d never say anything other than his squad, which led to Noah asking what the biggest difference was between that Heat team and this Nets team, to which Bosh heaped praise on not just the Nets but this current generation of NBA stars for doing things no one ever has on the basketball court.
Who would win a hypothetical matchup between the Nets’s Big Three and the Heat’s Big Three? @ChrisBosh weighs in. pic.twitter.com/enqDZGMSPn
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) June 9, 2021
As Bosh notes, the combination of offensive talent and skill in Brooklyn is like nothing he’s ever seen. To have three guys that capable of scoring and creating for themselves playing together is unheard of, and the way they have seamlessly meshed to dominate on that end without the hiccups and growing pains you so often see from superteams is truly a sight to behold. It’s also nice to see a Hall of Famer showing love to the current generation and acknowledging how far the game has come even in 10 years.
So often former players are loathe to heap praise on the current state of the game without adding a qualifier to ensure no one questions what they did, but Bosh happily notes that these guys do things he could never dream of and, as he said, he was able to fill it up himself. That’s good for the game and he recognizes his place in that lineage. Bosh was one of the players who showed what a big could do on the perimeter as a scorer and helped pave the way for someone like Durant to come in and take that to the next level, and he seems to recognize that and marvel at how this current generation has continued to build on and push the boundaries of what it means to be an elite offensive player.
